- Restless Hearts, Resting Places
- Posts
- Why Discipleship Begins with Prayer
Why Discipleship Begins with Prayer
Another Invitation to the Most Important Spiritual Discipline
Ryan Patrick Murphy
July 25, 2025
In case you missed it, we made a prayer journal, and we’d love to share it with you! We want to help you creatively engage with God every single day and grow in your confidence in hearing his voice.
35 The next day John was there again with two of his disciples. 36 When he saw Jesus passing by, he said, “Look, the Lamb of God!”
37 When the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus. 38 Turning around, Jesus saw them following and asked, “What do you want?”
They said, “Rabbi” (which means “Teacher”), “where are you staying?”
39 “Come,” he replied, “and you will see.”
So they went and saw where he was staying, and they spent that day with him. It was about four in the afternoon.
At the beginning of the Gospel of John, the first question Jesus ever asks his disciples is this:
“What do you want?”
In other words: What are you looking for? What are you longing for?
He asks this after John the Baptist has invited the disciples to look at and to behold Jesus, the Lamb.
They ask if they can see where he is staying, and he invites them to come and see.
Thus begins their journey of discipleship — with an invitation to behold Jesus, with a question around their longing and desire, and with an invitation to see and stay with Jesus.
In short, their discipleship journey begins with an invitation to prayer.
We might define prayer as simply being with Jesus — “abiding” or “staying” with him, in the words of John — and learning how to direct our desires towards him so that he alone can fulfill every longing in our heart.
We look at him, we keep looking at him, and we are transformed. We behold him, and as we behold him, we become like him.
Prayer begins by acknowledging that, despite our desires for a thousand different things, Jesus is the only one who can fulfill them.
And then we grow in prayer by simply staying with him!
This life of seeing, staying, and transforming is the whole context in which “discipleship” is meant to happen.
We might approach a word like “discipleship” with a lot of ideas associated with it — perhaps we think of sitting at a coffee shop with a mentor to receive wisdom and insight about problems we’re facing in our life. Or, we might think of a course where we are learning the basics of Christian faith or doctrine, or perhaps we even think of discipleship as a set of spiritual disciplines to adopt in the hope of transformation and change. (Side note: I recently preached a sermon where I bust Six Myths About Discipleship if you are interested in checking it out!)
Yet, historically, a journey of Christian discipleship has been primarily a journey of learning how to pray.
The journey of learning how to pray is meant to lead to a lot of other things — an understanding of basic doctrine, generosity, love of neighbor, reading the Bible, life in community, and on and on…but it is meant to begin and end in a dynamic, ongoing, conversational relationship with the Resurrected Christ via the Holy Spirit. Discipleship is a life of ongoing transformation in community fueled by the Spirit in the context of a dynamic, interactive relationship with Jesus — not self-help or behavior modification.
The classics of the Christian tradition, such as The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis, all assume this. They assume that there is an underlying, ongoing, conversational relationship with God at the heart of a believer’s life within which everything else occurs.
In fact, many of the classics of the Christian tradition are primarily treatises on how to pray — just read The Cloud of Unknowing, The Interior Castle, even The Imitation of Christ. It was assumed for much of Christian history that following Jesus meant you were saying yes primarily to a journey of growing in prayer that would lead to the transformation of self for the sake of love of neighbor.
On The Imitation of Christ, Catholic New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson argues:
“The Imitation found such popularity because it communicated in a simple but powerful fashion what might be called the classic or perennial understanding of Christian discipleship, namely, that the goal of the dedicated Christian—the disciple—is the transformation of self in the image of Christ.”
The way this transformation happens, he argues, alongside Thomas a Kempis and the great cloud of witnesses of saints of the past two thousand years, is through prayer.
To put it back to the beginning of the Gospel of John, we look at Jesus, we keep looking at him, and we are transformed. This is discipleship. Everything else happens within the context of this holy conversation.
Paul the Apostle says:
“And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”
See him. Stay with him. Be transformed by him.
I’d love to invite us to pray today:
Begin to take a few deep breaths. Perhaps as you breathe in, pray “Come,” and as you breathe out, pray “Holy Spirit.”
In alignment with John’s invitation to behold the Lamb of God, have you ever tried to picture Jesus when you pray?
What might “staying” or “abiding” with Jesus look like in your practical rhythms today?
Is there any area of your life where you are longing for transformation?
Best,
Ryan